January 2011

Although roughly 200,000 black Americans fought for the Union in the Civl War, monuments in their honor are few and far between—especially in the South, where most of these soldiers and sailors hailed from and where more than 30,000 of them died.

But this year, the citizens of Norfolk, Virginia, paid official tribute to the U.S. Colored Troops who fought against the Old Dominion in the Civil War. Tucked away in a black burial ground on the western boundary of the city’s historic Elmwood Cemetery stands a six-foot-tall granite figure—of a one-time slave and Union soldier named William Carney. Raised early in the last century, the statue honors more than 100 black Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans buried nearby. Now, Norfolk has designated the monument with a historic marker and placed it on the state’s official Civil War Trail.

THE BASICS

Twice wholly destroyed and twice rebuilt, Norfolk is again redefined and is in the midst of an ambitious rehabilitation.

Until I met Murray Frazee, I didn’t know starboard from aft. My entire nautical experience up to that time had been a few weekend crabbing and fishing trips with my Uncle Dick and Aunt Shirley. Mr. Frazee lived on top of a hill on a large estate he called the Dolphin House. He was the father of some of my schoolmates, so I spent quite a bit of time there, and I always wondered about the fish on the mailbox. What I learned later was that it was a dolphin (the fish, not Flipper), the symbol of the U.S. Navy submarine service. I also found out that Mr. Frazee was retired Captain Frazee, who in the thick of World War II in the Pacific had helped define the essence of a submariner.

The handful of Civil War enthusiasts among our readers will have much to interest them this fall. David J. Eicher’s The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (Simon & Schuster, $40.00) is full of stately sentences that begin with phrases like “At dawn on the morning of September 17, McClellan had some 75,316 effectives arrayed as follows.—” On Campaign With the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Journal of Theodore Ayrault
Dodge (Cooper Square Press, $29.95) stands out from other soldiers’ diaries because the author, who had interrupted his European education to enlist, went on to become one of America’s greatest military historians. Images From the Storm (Free Press, $50.00) is the best book for browsers: It contains 300 detailed color drawings of Civil War scenes, most made from life, by Pvt. Robert Knox Sneden, a Union cartographer.

The highly fictionalized bestseller Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall , by Stuart Lake, a former press secretary to Theodore Roosevelt, begun with Wyatt’s cooperation and published in 1931, changed the Hollywood Western forever by centering it on a legendary peace officer, an organized outlaw element, a classic showdown (the so-called gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which happened 12.0 years ago this October z6), and a cycle of subsequent revenge that called the lawman’s ethics into question. From the first Earp film, Law and Order in 1932 with Walter Huston, Earp’s image has dominated the genre, inspiring nearly 40 movies and several TV series. Here are some examples, all available on either video or DVD, that run the spectrum of views on Wyatt Earp’s life and legend.

You know what the word Autumn means, but do you ever use it? Not very often, if you’re like most Americans. Saying autumn , like spelling color as colour or talking with an English accent, conveys in this country the tone of mild pretentiousness (or, in advertisements, elegance) that we associate with
things British—a notion that would surprise a resident of the seamier portions of Birmingham or Bradford. Autumn is all but universal in Britain, as fall is in the United States. How did this happen?

Book Douglas Mclntyre, The Official Guide to Railroad Dining Car China (1990: Golden Spike Enterprises, P.O. Box 442, Williamsville, NY 14221). Web site http://www.klnl.org/ for the Key, Lock & Lantern collectors’ club. Club Railroadiana Collectors Association, 550 Veronica Place, Escondido, CA 92027. Dealer Track 16, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90404; http://www.track16vintage.com.

The first railroad passengers boarded an American train in 1830. They’d better not have been hungry. Dinner wasn’t served until 1868, when George Pullman designed a sumptuous dining car for the Chicago & Alton.

Pullman’s “Delmonico” and the dining cars that copied it on hundreds of lines all over the country offered meals cooked to order and table settings equivalent to those in a hotel restaurant. Gentle chimes called passengers to dine, and for a hundred years after the first tones sounded, the best dining cars were on a par with any restaurant in the country. Railroad chefs had a special advantage, gathering local ingredients in farm towns iu fishing ports as they went along. Delicious food was essential to drawing customers, and the railroads willingly subsidized the feast, typically losing 50 cents on every dollar spent in their dining cars.